🔥Welcome to Volume #00080!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
If you enjoy the newsletter please share it with your friends.
I’m writing another 30 essays and doing dailyish art on Twitter if you want to follow along.
🔳Looking For the Pause Button🔳
[Chorus}
I just want to feel this moment last forever
I just hold on to all the time we spent together
I know when it's over
I'm gonna wish to start it over
I just want to feel this moment last forever
[Drop]
Feel this moment last forever
Feel this moment last forever
Hearing these lyrics on the way back from Capoeira, my eyes started to tear up. My three-year-old son and my six-year-old son sat on our Surly "Big Easy" bike bench. I bobbed to the tunes and peddled away. The temperature stood at 7 degrees Fahrenheit, which didn't help my eyes.
Tuesday was one of those nights. Alex and Isaac took a class together and then hung out while I trained. Afterward, we started to play and run around.
I wanted to press pause.
I wanted to always have the two little guys throwing kicks at me and doing handstands. I wanted us to play like this into infinity.
I wanted to feel that moment lasting forever.
I'm not sure if it is a product of getting older, having kids, or the combination, but the feeling of moments floating by keeps increasing.
It's like when we lose friends; we love being around to job changes, moves, and graduations. The moments go away, and hitting pause or rewind isn't an option.
We get to be grateful for those moments. We get to be thankful for the beautiful people in our lives and who walked through our lives at various points.
Life is creating those moments that we want to last forever. Hugging and holding them when they show up.
Randomly we took this photo at the end of the night
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” - Thich Nhat Hanh
We don’t get to press pause, but we do get to appreciate the everyday miracles.
📓Things to Think About📓
I wrote a piece on what ideas we can borrow from David Goggins
Taking souls, callous your mind, finding our extra 60% and peaceful but unsatisfied make up the key points.
Why our brains don’t like PowerPoint presentations by Inc Mag.
We’ve all run into PowerPoint presentations and we’ve all given presentations. If we want people to pay attention to us, PowerPoint helps destroy our story.
In other words, when your brain hears words and sees different words, either it simply short-circuits (in which case you zone out) or it toggles between the two set of words, garbling both. This is why virtually all PowerPoint presentations are boring and forgettable.
Your brain can, however, multitask when multitasking puts demands on different parts of your brain. That's why you can drive a car safely while listening to a podcast .
🎧Things to Listen, See, and Watch 🎧
The Kid Cudi documentary on Amazon Prime is a masterpiece on being creative and the struggles everyone faces.
“Anything can be changed in life. Nothing is really fixed.” – Pharrell Williams
“Stick to the script. Fuck that.” – Kid Cudi
Being open to things might change your life
Find people to nourish and feed your energy —> right people 🔓us
“Cudi does what he feels that is the difference between an artist and other people” – Kanye
“Programed from 0-7 to fit into “reality” and we are breaking out of the constructs of current society” - Cudi
Just focused on the art and the story he was trying to tell
Never say NO
Think outside the box, do things you shouldn’t do
Invest your heart… if you don’t give a fuck, why invest your heart…. You have a need to … you feel people need this and sharing them can heal not just the person making it, but the person receiving it..full investment of heart on both sides
Waiver to be open to your emotions
“Connection is high – feel a natural part of something. Find your roots” - Asap Rocky
Keep moving forward…. Keep moving forward…
Life is crazy… we are all figuring things out… we will survive
Everything he makes has to help people… that is the goal… inspire others to tell their story
All of this 👇👇👇👇👇👇…. What we should be focusing on for people under 35 vs COVID
Reminder to start playing in hard mode before it is too late!
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Neil Gaiman and Dave Mckean, Coraline
"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy
"A Change in Perspective Is Worth 80 IQ Points’ So said Alan Kay, one of the pioneers of computer graphics. It is, perhaps, the best defence of creativity in ten words or fewer.”
David Eagleman, Livewired
"Who you are owes as much to your surroundings as it does to the DNA inside you."
Byung-Chul Han
"Rites of passage give structure to life in the same way seasons do. Whoever passes a certain threshold has concluded a phase of life and enters into a new one. Thresholds, as transitions, give a rhythm to, articulate, and even narrate space and time."
Kenny Werner, Effortless Mastery
"The highest state a musician can be in is a selfless state. Just as a river bed receives the great waters, we receive inspiring ideas."
Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
"No matter how slow I might run, I wasn’t about to walk. That was the rule. Break one of my rules once, and I’m bound to break many more. And if I’d done that, it would have been next to impossible to finish this race."
Venkatesh Rao, Tempo
"We expect to be transformed by significant life experiences and know that we cannot predict the behavior of the person who emerges at the other end of a deep story."
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What do you want to do more of since the pause button doesn’t exist?
We need to do it now because we can’t hit rewind. We just get play all the way.
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Isaac turning 3!
🔳Looking For the Pause Button🔳